“I am now,” I said.

“How did the wedding go?”

A laugh slipped out before I could stop it.

Not joy. Not amusement.

Just disbelief that the question even needed answering.

“About as well as you’d expect,” I said.

On the other end, my attorney didn’t respond immediately. I could hear him breathing, thinking—like he already knew the answer but was deciding whether he wanted confirmation.

Finally, he exhaled.

A long, controlled sound.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I looked down at the open folders spread across my desk.

Bank transfers routed through shell accounts.

Property titles quietly shifted into names that were never mine.

Messages. Dates. Locations. Patterns that stopped looking like coincidence once you stepped far enough back.

And the photographs.

Always the photographs.

Evidence has a strange quality when you’ve held it long enough. At first, it feels like proof of pain. Later, it starts to feel like proof of clarity.

I closed the leather folder slowly.

“I’ve been ready for a while,” I said.

Outside, Chicago kept moving like nothing had changed. Cars sliding through wet streets. Lights reflected in glass towers. People asleep in buildings that didn’t know their names were about to matter in someone else’s ending.

My attorney’s voice softened slightly.

“Then we proceed.”

I opened the second folder.

This one was thinner.

Final notices. Draft filings. The shape of consequences, already prepared—waiting only for my signature to make them real.

My pen sat beside it.

Still.

Patient.

For a moment, I thought about Nathan’s voicemail. The strain in his voice. The careful way he tried to pull everything back into “talking it through,” as if words could undo structure, as if regret could rewrite timing.

I didn’t feel anger when I thought of it anymore.

That surprised me more than anything.

Not anger.

Distance.

I signed my name.

Slowly. Cleanly.

No hesitation.

The ink dried almost immediately.

“Done,” I said.

There was a pause on the line.

Then my attorney spoke again, quieter this time.

“Then it’s no longer a secret. It’s a case.”

I looked at the rain hitting the window, steady and indifferent.

“No,” I corrected him softly.

“It’s just the truth… finally on record.”